Philip Hickey has the story. (Reading his quote from Paul Summergrad’s address at the most recent APA meeting almost makes me feel sorry for them. They so desperately want to believe that discoveries validating their bogus diagnoses and magically justifying their decades of false claims and scientific fakery are right around the corner - “That we have not yet achieved interventions based on these insights or diagnostic tests is not because we will not achieve them, but because of the complexity of what we are studying.” Indeed, in his latest piece doubling down on the bizarre and patently untrue contention that psychiatry never propounded the chemical-imbalance idea, Ronald Pies actually drags out another of these perpetually “intriguing,” “promising” notions. After chemical imbalances, brain-circuit disturbances, stress hormones, telomeres,…we now have the “immune inflammatory metabolic model.” Whitaker and Cosgrove are right: their faith is too strong and too closely bound to their personal, professional, and material interests for challenges to take root within the field. Meanwhile, they cause a lot of harm.)

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

“This drawing did not mock migrants but our liberal and hypocritical society… this rich, hyper-consumerist Europe that had to wait for the mediatisation of the death of a child to reflect on the fate of migrants.”

“This video posted by the news agency PalMedia shows a young Palestinian woman left to bleed on a sidewalk in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron after she was shot by Israeli soldiers on Tuesday morning.

By evening, Palestinian media reported that the woman, 18-year-old Hadil Salah Hashlamoun, had died of her injuries.

Instead of being given immediate medical treatment, the video shows her being pulled roughly out of the frame of the camera, her scarf coming off as her head drags on the ground.

Israeli settlers and soldiers can be seen standing around, and in some cases smiling and laughing in the background.

Wattan TV reported that the young woman was left to bleed for more than 30 minutes.

…

The Israeli army claimed that she was shot after she tried to stab a soldier, the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported. But photos and eyewitnesses contradict this account.”

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

…The major center of radical Islam, extremist radical Islam, is Saudi Arabia, unquestionably. They are the source of the Wahhabization of the region, which Patrick Cockburn points out is one of the major developments of the modern era. Who’s the main supporter of Saudi Arabia? You are. You know, that’s where your tax dollars go. It’s been for a long time. Right now tens of billions of dollars of arms being sent under Obama, but it goes way back.

…The most extreme and interesting example [of the US government supporting a secular state in the Middle East] is Saddam Hussein, who was greatly loved by the Reagan administration and by the Bush I administration. I could give you the details, but they were so supportive of Saddam Hussein that he was even given a gift that otherwise only Israel has been granted, no other country. He was permitted to attack a U.S. naval vessel, killing a couple of dozen American sailors, and to get away with it with just a tap on the wrist. Israel had done the same thing in 1967. Saddam Hussein did it in 1987. And the friendship for Saddam Hussein was so enormous that he was granted that right. And that was a secular state. In fact, George Bush number one even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production. That’s a pretty supportive relationship. So there are cases where the United States has supported secular Islam, but typically it’s radical Islam that has been the beneficiary of U.S. support, like Britain before it.

…The only conceivable hope for some resolution of this horrendous crisis [in Syria], which is totally destroying the country, is the kind of negotiated settlement that was worked on by serious negotiators, like Lakhdar Brahimi, an international negotiator, very respectable, sensible. And the main idea, which—shared by any analyst with a grey cell functioning, is some kind of negotiated settlement which will involve the Assad government, like it or not, and involve the opposition elements, like it or not. There can’t be negotiations that don’t involve the parties that are fighting. That’s pretty obvious, just as South African negotiations had to involve the leadership of the apartheid state. There’s no other way. They can’t have other negotiations. It’s perfectly obvious that the Assad government is not going to enter into negotiations that are based on the condition that it commits suicide. If that’s the condition, they’re just going to keep destroying the country. That unfortunately is the—has been the U.S. position of the negotiations. U.S. and its allies have demanded that negotiations be based on the precondition that the Assad government will not survive. It’s a horrible government, and I’d like it not to survive, but that’s a prescription for destroying Syria, because it’s not going to enter into negotiations on those terms.

…I think what’s actually happened is that during the whole so-called neoliberal period, last generation, both political parties have drifted to the right. Today’s Democrats are what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just drifted off the spectrum. They’re so committed to extreme wealth and power that they cannot get votes, can’t get votes by presenting those positions. So what has happened is that they’ve mobilized sectors of the population that have been around for a long time. It is a pretty exceptional country in many ways. One is it’s extremely religious. It’s one of the most extreme fundamentalist countries in the world. And by now, I suspect the majority of the base of the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, extremists, not—they’re a mixture, but these are the extremist ones, nativists who are afraid that, you know, ‘they are taking our white Anglo-Saxon country away from us’, people who have to have guns when they go into Starbucks because, who knows, they might get killed by an Islamic terrorist and so on. I mean, all of that is part of the country, and it goes back to colonial days. There are real roots to it. But these have not been an organized political force in the past. They are now. That’s the base of the Republican Party. And you see it in the primaries. So, yeah, Trump is maybe comic relief, but it’s just a—it’s not that different from the mainstream, which I think is more important.

…The United States did not—it was a—it may have been—it was probably the richest country in the world back in the early 19th century, but not the most powerful country. Britain was the most powerful. France was a powerful country. And that changed over the years, especially with the First World War and finally with the Second World War. So, exceptionalism has greatly expanded as power expanded. And I say again that this exceptionalism was also true of other great powers during their day of imperial power and domination.

…Israel is now - does play a major role - small country, but good high-tech industry, and it plays a major role in repression and aggression. It’s developed - the Israeli arms fairs, where they sell their arms, they advertise, correctly, that they have developed advanced means of repression and control, and that the arms that they’re displaying are battlefield-tested, namely against the Palestinians. So they’ve refined the techniques of control. And they contribute to that all over the place—in Central America, even in the United States. They’re providing advice on how to bar Honduran immigrants, say, from coming to the United States. They help train police and so on, many examples.

…One of the major doctrines of international affairs, which doesn’t appear in the literature, is the Mafia doctrine. International affairs are run like the—very much like the Mafia. The godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It’s much too dangerous. So, if some small storekeeper somewhere, say, doesn’t pay protection money, the don doesn’t accept it. You send their goons to beat him to a pulp, even if you don’t need the money, because others might get the idea, then things might start to erode. That is a dominant principle of international affairs. In fact, that was the reason for the 1953 coup [in Iran, orchestrated by the CIA], when you look back. And it’s also the reason why—for U.S. hostility to Iran, which is extreme. I mentioned the support for Saddam Hussein. That was an attack on Iran, and a serious one. But they defied orders. They overthrew a U.S.-imposed tyrant. They thumbed their nose at the United States. And you don’t get away with that.

…Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Latin American adviser, reported to him the report of his Latin American mission, said the problem is the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which appeals to others in the hemisphere where people suffer similar repression, and you can’t let that idea spread.

His assertion that in Syria the US government “has taken a somewhat hands-off position, except that it’s supporting its allies” is an understatement. I hope to write more about this soon, but see, for example, this revealing document, here, and here.

“In today’s Greece of human and social disasters, all those who rush to the defence of the torturers and their inhuman policies (media, political parties, the establishment, corrupt politicians, occult circles of power, employers’ unions and even Mafiosi) play the most diabolical sexist cards to the limit, as never before, to smash the action of women who lead the struggles against austerity policies and the debt system, who defend migrants, refugees, the environment and the many victims of the currently applied barbarous policies.”*

“The people will thwart the plans of those who want to push them into a corner and impose bailouts against their will. The new generations know who betrayed them and will take initiatives to restore democracy in our land.”

It’s so fun - and so easy - to highlight and protest the bad acts done by the countries declared to be the Bad Ones by your own government. It’s not quite as fun or easy to highlight and protest the bad acts done by your own government itself or its closest allies. Yet as O’Brien pointed out, journalism is far more valuable, and the public interest served far more, by doing the latter rather than the former.

“[Robert] Califf’s appointment as FDA commissioner would accelerate a decades-long trend in which agency leadership too often makes decisions that are aligned more with the interests of industry, rather than those of public health and patients.”

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Hugo Chávez was not a dictator. He was a popular, democratically elected president of Venezuela. You imperil Venezuelan democracy and empower the Right in Venezuela and the US when you repeat such bogus characterizations. There are very real forces working diligently to overthrow South American democracies and to (re)establish US-dominated corporatocracies, real dictatorships, and your carelessness has helped their cause. Millions of lives are at stake. I hope you’ll be more responsible in the future, and correct this error from tonight’s broadcast.

This report in the Guardian about the reanalysis of the infamous Study 329 links to both the reanalysis itself and an accompanying feature article by BMJ Associate Editor Peter Doshi describing the years of frustrated attempts to get the original article retracted, both of which are open access. Doshi’s piece - “No correction, no retraction, no apology, no comment: paroxetine trial reanalysis raises questions about institutional responsibility” – is a scathing indictment of the institutions involved, specifically the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), whose journal (JAACAP) published the article by Keller et al. in 2001, and Brown University. The feature quotes several experts, including Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch, which posted about the matter yesterday.

Reanalysis of antidepressant trial finds popular drug ineffective and unsafe for adolescents

Results contradict original findings and have important implications for research and practice

The widely used antidepressant paroxetine is neither safe nor effective for adolescents with depression, concludes a reanalysis of an influential study originally published in 2001.

The new results, published by The BMJ today, contradict the original research findings that portrayed paroxetine as an effective and safe treatment for children and adolescents with major depression.

It is the first trial to be reanalysed and published by The BMJ under an initiative called RIAT (Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials), which encourages abandoned or misreported studies to be published or formally corrected to ensure doctors and patients have complete and accurate information to make treatment decisions.

In 2001 SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), funded a study (known as Study 329) to compare the effectiveness and safety of the antidepressant drugs paroxetine and imipramine with placebo for adolescents diagnosed with major depression.

It reported that paroxetine was safe and effective for adolescents and was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) in 2001.

The study was criticised by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2002. Yet, that year, over two million prescriptions were written for children and adolescents in the United States.

In 2012 GSK was fined a record $3bn in part for fraudulently promoting paroxetine.

The RIAT team, led by Professor Jon Jureidini at the University of Adelaide, identified this study as an example of a misreported trial in need of restoration.

Using previously confidential trial documents, they reanalysed the original data and found that neither paroxetine nor high dose imipramine was more effective than placebo in the treatment of major depression in adolescents. The authors considered the increase in harms with both drugs to be clinically significant.

They conclude that “paroxetine was ineffective and unsafe in this study.”

The reanalysis of Study 329 “illustrates the necessity of making primary trial data and protocols available to increase the rigour of the evidence base,” say the authors.

In an accompanying article, Peter Doshi, Associate Editor for The BMJ says the new paper “has reignited calls for retraction of the original study and put additional pressure on academic and professional institutions to publicly address the many allegations of wrongdoing.”

He points out that the original manuscript was not written by any of the 22 named authors but by an outside medical writer hired by GSK. And that the paper’s lead author - Brown University’s chief of psychiatry, Martin Keller - had been the focus of a front page investigation in the Boston Globe in 1999 that documented his under-reporting of financial ties to drug companies.

Doshi also details the refusal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry to intervene and retract the paper, and Brown University’s silence over its faculty’s involvement in Study 329.

“It is often said that science self corrects. But for those who have been calling for a retraction of the Keller paper for many years, the system has failed,” argues Doshi.

Dr Fiona Godlee, The BMJ Editor-in-Chief says publication of the reanalysed data from Study 329 “sets the record straight” and “shows the extent to which drug regulation is failing us.” It also shows that the public and clinicians do not have the unbiased information they need to make informed decisions.

She calls for independent clinical trials rather than trials funded and managed by industry, as well as legislation “to ensure that the results of all clinical trials are made fully available and the individual patient data are available for legitimate independent third party scrutiny.”

Liberating the data from clinical trials has the potential to benefit patients, prevent harm, and correct misleading research, writes Professor David Henry at the University of Toronto, in an accompanying editorial.

Data sharing is not without its risks, he says, but the pay-off from a systematic effort to reactivate important clinical trials will be high and will further justify the original huge investments of time and money, he concludes.

“I have a utopian solution, which is also politically incorrect.* There are countries in the world today that ought to be, for a time, not-independent and not-sovereign. What the world needs, and what the UN might provide if it were the organization it was meant to be: a new trusteeship system for countries that are temporarily unable to govern themselves.”

You may own the best gadgets, the coolest fashions, and the swiftest cars, but the next generation’s hipper iterations have already been imagined. When all else is replaced, repaired, expired, or obsolete only your paintings will remain and will say the most about who you are and what you value.”

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The best propaganda is free and unintended. That’s the case with this article from February about some USian and British guys who volunteered to fight ISIS with the Kurdish YPG only to discover…a revolution.

According to foreign fighters quoted by AFP, an exodus is currently underway of US and other Western volunteers from the YPG due their left-wing stance, with one US army veteran – referred to as ‘Scott’ – claiming he decided not to join after finding out they were a ‘bunch of damn Reds’.*

Evidently, several of these guys are now fighting their Christian holy war with the Ronald Reagan Brigade.**

As the article notes, others have chosen to work and fight with the YPG because of their politics. A moving statement from a British volunteer was posted just this week:

…In Kurdistan, particularly that part that is currently in Syria, there is a left side.

In ‘the most dangerous place in the world’, they are doing what the left should do — providing a safe haven for all ethnicities and religions while championing none, through radical direct democracy.

They are combating the worst misogyny in the world with some of the most advanced gender policies on the planet. For each formal leadership position in the Kurdish state there must be one man and one woman.

Images of the Women’s Defence Units, fighting not only with Kalashnikovs but their hair uncovered, have captivated the world.

They are proclaiming a revolution against capitalism and defending it against Isis, the West’s latest creation to ensure regional instability, thereby facilitating further foreign intervention at such time as it should become advantageous.

There is a left side, there is always a left side, and if someone else succeeds in breaking forward where you have not, and calls for you to join them, you must join them. So I will….

“If the people who now wax indignant about the Aylan Kurdi cartoons supported Charlie Hebdo last winter and joined demonstrations carrying ‘Je suis Charlie’ signs, they clearly did it for the wrong reasons. The magazine was attacked for putting potent symbols through the grinder. It’s done that again with the now-iconic photograph of the dead boy. As usual with Charlie, the message is transparent: Don’t dare use this photograph to advertise shallow, ineffectual charity; don’t be secretly dismissive because it was not your child and not a European child; don’t trivialize Aylan Kurdi’s death by turning it into a political cliche. ‘If you can look at the original photograph without averting your eyes but you can’t look at these cartoons, there’s something wrong with you’, the artists tell their audience.”

And we should be aware of the additional level of irony – that the dead at Charlie Hebdo have been used in the same way. Fortunately, their surviving colleagues are contesting their exploitation as a sacred political symbol by carrying on their iconoclastic work.

Also disappointing is how many people think journalism consists of pitting a series of tweets attacking the magazine against a series of tweets defending it (or worse, simply reporting the allegedly justified outrage). It hasn’t occurred to these people to try to understand the satirical purpose of the images, by, say, reading the magazine or seeking comment from those who are more informed? Of course not. What was I thinking? Reporting on and goading a social-media mob while briefly alluding to a few people suggesting the images are being misread is all that’s required.

Friday, September 11, 2015

“[T]he goal of a karesansui garden is to suggest magnificent scenes from nature by forming the shapes of various landscape elements such as waterfalls, mountains, islands and ocean … thus the garden expresses the vastness of nature in miniature, within a strictly limited space.”

“The hunger strike started by us as PKK and PAJK prisoners on August 15 has entered its 26th day. We salute the resistance of our people and all those resisting bravely for the building of self-rule in neighborhoods, towns and districts. We would like to state that we will enhance our resistance further as long as the AKP government’s policies of denial and annihilation against the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Kurdish people continue.”

“If the US was serious about fighting IS, it would not only have been providing full support – both in deed and in word – to the YPG and YPJ and its sister organization, the PKK, but it would also confront Turkey on the mountains of evidence that they have in fact been supporting IS. It would demand that the borders with the Kurdish regions in Syria would be opened, and that the bombing campaign against PKK positions as well as the terror campaign against Kurdish civilians be seized [sic] immediately. Most importantly, it would take the PKK of[f] the terror list.

Unfortunately, the US’ actions have shown that it is interested in no such thing.

Rather than defeating IS, its objective is the preservation and expansion of its influence in the region. For this, Turkey is a much more valuable partner than either the YPG and YPJ or the PKK. Action speaks louder than words, and in choosing its allies the US has shown clearly where its priorities really lie: power over democracy, influence over honesty and war over peace.”

Sunday, September 6, 2015

“I must lose in a world where only the winner is a Man, a human being. I was not a real Man. I was a queer, a half-Man, a pseudo-Man, like a woman…. Men fought and won, they fought other men for the ownership of the rest of creation, lesser peoples, the losers, women, the Third World, as well as the natural environment. I could never be a real Man.

We must not give up our humanity to become like the Man. We must not seek to conquer, to become the master. Our gayness, our ability to love one another, is our humanity, and it must not be sold for the Man’s mastery over others. And if the straight Man’s revolution is based on mastery and conquest we will have no part in it. But we are going to make a gay revolution, a revolution that will be an assertion of humanity. And remembering what you taught us of our humanity, we gay men, together with women, and all the other victims, those who don’t seek to be masters, can create it.”

“If Australia was sincere about fighting ISIS, it would end the criminalisation of the PKK and other laws that have frustrated attempts at practical solidarity with the democratic resistance to ISIS. The embargo preventing the YPG/J or PKK obtaining heavy weapons would be lifted and Turkish state support for ISIS would be exposed and opposed.”

“The Kurdish people of Kobane have shown tremendous courage and resilience in their resistance to the ISIS onslaught. The determination of the men and women to fight to defend the territory where they have established democratic self-rule has inspired people across the world.

The Kurds in Kobane are defending the values of democracy, inclusiveness, respect for difference and gender equality, against a ruthlessly intolerant force that offers only an orgy of bloodletting, carnage, public executions, vile abuse of women and even the repudiation of the right to education, learning and independent thought. The Kurdish resistance, and in particular the brave men and women fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ), represent the hope that these humane values will triumph over a tyranny that would take humanity back to the dark ages. As such, the Kurds have received widespread respect.

In stark contrast, Turkey has been exposed for its duplicity and total unreliability as an ally in the coalition against the ISIS threat. Turkey’s leaders from President Erdogan downwards have preferred to bomb Kurdish camps, as they did on 14 October, rather than take swift and effective action against the murderous jihadists….”

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

“We arrived at midnight on Tuesday and stayed until 3am. I have been at protests which started at 5am, but this was my first that started at midnight, and I was so comforted by the activists who came to be there at such an odd and early hour. We stationed ourselves in a spot where the truck would have to stop at the red light that is actually on a busy highway, but it is quieter at this hour.

We were able to rush to the side of the truck to be near the chickens. Although to avoid us, one truck driver drove through the red light.

Every truck was different as was the placement of the chickens in the crates—some facing us, some not. But one, who I can still see, was a small chicken lying on her side facing me. I could see her baby blue eye and her exhausted face staring back at me, blinking. She was on her side and looked like she was being crushed.

This is where bearing witness becomes almost unbearable. Watching her look at me and not being able to get her out is one of those situations where you fear losing your sanity because you lack the ability to do anything, much less comprehend why this gentle little bird was about to smell death, experience even more fear, and of course, die herself.

As I sit here now, my heart hurts and my eyes burn from the idea that she was probably gone within hours of me seeing her along with so many like her—thousands of them. The image of her will forever be in my heart and mind.

And all I can tell myself is that at least I was able to tell her (and all of them) how sorry I was and that I loved her. Which I repeated over and over…”